In today's episode, we explore how a seemingly passé concept of sin, masquerades under everyone's new favorite buzzword “perfection.” We dive into how monoliths (even one's we disavow) still shape our lives in significant, and sometimes heartbreaking ways.

To back that train up a bit though, we're still exploring how we form and understand our own story by looking at how external factors influence us. This week, we examine culture impacts our story, next week we'll explore how smaller subsets of culture aka community influences our story, and then in two weeks, we'll go deep (fingers crossed we survive) and we'll consider how our close kin (read: family of origin, family of choosing, and close friends) shape our the skeleton of our story in ways that it can be bone-achingly painful to wake up too.

But today, we gotta admit that it's kind of ridiculous to think we can discuss the entire impact of culture on our story. Talking about culture is a crazy huge endeavor (like, literally, it's 98% of what all humanities departments think, write, and present about). In order to give us a taste of how culture influences us in unseen ways, we break it down:

* Culture is composed of specific monoliths, uniform and seemingly unfeeling when you glance at them from the outside, but their bursting with life and lots of mess when you're in them.* Religion, a kind of monolith, comes in many different flavors and shapes, but all are focused on understanding if there is something beyond us (a person, spirit, river, or amorphous monster) and what relationship with that divine thing/person/idea we ought to have. * Religion then introduces a specific concept: “sin” to mediate between us and the divine other. And even when we reject religion, many of the concepts it introduces still exist in subtle ways. Sin becomes rebranded.

Don't forget to subscribe because next week Jenn will dive into how boy bands have profound truths to teach us about what it means to be in community (and how awkward and painful it can be to try to fit in when what we really want is to belong).

Ready to go deeper?

* Jenn struggled (valiently) to remember the term ozone layer.* If you're wanting to freak yourself out, then you can read more about how the insects are dying off here.* You can dive deeper into reading about perfectionism and shame by checking out some of Jenn's favorite resources. We'd suggest starting first with Brene Brown's immense brilliance; hang out and check out John Bradshaw's classic Healing the Shame that Binds You. If you love learning, but know you need to buckle down and actually start applying all of this stuff, then check out Jon Acuff's Finish for some practical advice of how to move through shit when you're stuck in the perfectionistic rut. For those of you who dig clinical stuff, Jenn particularly loves Hewitt, Flett, and Mikail's Perfectioni...